This session covers the numerous political cartoons in which Theodore Roosevelt was featured and the Newspaper Navigator, a project that extracts cartoons and other visual content from 175 years of digitized historic newspapers.

Featured Image from “Theodore Roosevelt: A Career Told Through Political Cartoons” by Tracee Haupt

Moderator: Ondine Le Blanc, Ford Editor of Publications at the Massachusetts Historical Society.

Clay S. Jenkinson and Sharon A. Kilzer, “Theodore Roosevelt in Cartoon.” 

Roosevelt was the most often cartooned figure of his time and he continues to be one of the most cartooned of all American Presidents. Because of his formative time in the Dakota badlands and his heroic activities in Cuba in 1898, he is most often depicted as a cowboy, a Rough Rider, or a big game hunter. He often brandishes his famous “big stick,” and he is sometimes portrayed as an American colossus.

The Theodore Roosevelt Center’s large and growing collection of Roosevelt political cartoons presents some challenges in our attempt to explore his life and achievement in all of their complexity. Roosevelt was–at times–arguably an imperialist, a racist, a hunter with a lust for killing large quadrupeds, a believer in the “white man’s burden,” and even, briefly, a eugenicist. Political cartoons, as a useful window on the man and his times, inevitably sometimes reflect all of the themes. To put it simply, a number of Roosevelt cartoons would not be drawn or published today, and some of them make one cringe. The Theodore Roosevelt Center seeks not to suppress any of these important historical documents but to surround them with interpretive commentary that both places them in their historical context and indicates our sensitivity to their potentially incendiary or hurtful content. We recognize, however, the challenge of insuring that anyone who accesses problematic cartoons (or other documents) understands and appreciates the need for this critical contextualization. Sharon Kilzer and Clay Jenkinson will examine sample Roosevelt cartoons to explore the challenge and the opportunity they represent.

Trained in English Renaissance literature at the University of Minnesota and Oxford, where he was a Rhodes and Danforth scholar, Clay S. Jenkinson  writes books, portrays a number of historical characters, including Thomas Jefferson, Theodore Roosevelt, and Meriwether Lewis, appears in documentary films, including four by Ken Burns, edits the national Lewis & Clark quarterly journal We Proceeded On, hosts the nationally syndicated public radio program and podcast the Thomas Jefferson Hour, hosts and moderates humanities symposia, and serves as an editor-at-large for the distinguished online journal Governing.com. Clay is the winner of many awards, including the National Humanities Medal, the highest honor bestowed by the National Endowment for the Humanities.
https://www.facebook.com/clay.jenkinson

Sharon Kilzer is the Project Manager for the Theodore Roosevelt Center at Dickinson State University, which is creating a comprehensive digital presidential library of all things TR at www.theodorerooseveltcenter.org. An alumna of Dickinson State University with degrees in business administration and business education, she also holds a master’s degree in theology and Christian ministry from Franciscan University of Steubenville, Ohio. Bridging the worlds of education and executive administration, Kilzer identifies and coordinates the resources to bring the TR Center vision to reality.

Benjamin Charles Germain Lee, “Newspaper Navigator: Using Machine Learning to Excavate Cartoons from Historic American Newspapers, 1789-1963”

The millions of digitized historic newspaper pages within Chronicling America, a joint initiative between the Library of Congress and the National Endowment for the Humanities, represent an incredibly rich resource for the American public. Historians, journalists, genealogists, students, and members of the American public explore the collection regularly via keyword search. But how do we navigate the abundant cartoons and other visual content? In this talk, I will present my project, Newspaper Navigator, created in collaboration with LC Labs, the National Digital Newspaper Program, and IT Design & Development at the Library of Congress, as well as Professor Daniel Weld at the University of Washington. In particular, I will discuss the two phases of Newspaper Navigator: extracting cartoons, photographs, illustrations, and other visual content from 16+ million pages in Chronicling America across 175 years of American history (resulting in the Newspaper Navigator dataset) and re-imagining how we search over the extracted visual content using the Newspaper Navigator search application. I will focus on a longitudinal analysis of cartoons within the Newspaper Navigator dataset, from the early American period to the 20th century. I will also discuss the Newspaper Navigator data archaeology, which critically investigates the limitations of the Newspaper Navigator dataset and machine learning as they relate to cultural heritage, with a focus on marginalization and erasure. I will conclude by discussing how this project can contribute to research in machine learning, human-computer interaction, and the digital humanities.

Resources:

• Newspaper Navigator dataset: https://news-navigator.labs.loc.gov/
• Newspaper Navigator search application: https://news-navigator.labs.loc.gov/search
• Newspaper Navigator data archaeology: https://hcommons.org/deposits/item/hc:32415/
• Newspaper Navigator project description & other links: https://bcglee.github.io/newspaper-navigator.html

Ben Lee (@lee_bcg) is a third year Ph.D. student in the Paul G. Allen School for Computer Science & Engineering at the University of Washington, where he studies human-AI interaction with his advisor, Professor Daniel Weld. He was also a 2020 Innovator in Residence at the Library of Congress. Ben served as the inaugural Digital Humanities Associate Fellow at the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum, as well as a Visiting Fellow in Harvard’s History Department after his graduation from Harvard College. He is currently a National Science Foundation Graduate Research Fellow, as well as the Richard Willner Memorial Fellow in the Stroum Center for Jewish Studies at the University of Washington.

This event will be recorded and uploaded to the ADE Youtube Channel.